Tuesday, October 20

Siddiqui: Looking for accountability over Gaza war

She's a prominent supreme court lawyer in Pakistan. She and her sister, both lifelong human rights activists, have been attacked for defending Christian and Hindu minorities, and promoting women's rights. They have lived under police protection and at times house arrest for angering the authorities.

Asma Jahangir has been the UN rapporteur on freedom of religion.Hina Jilani is the UN rapporteur on human rights. In 2006 she was a member of the UN commission of inquiry on Darfur. Its report, rejected by Sudan as biased but backed by the U.S., led to the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Jilani was also part of the UN panel led by South African judge Richard Goldstone that has accused Israel and Hamas, but mostly Israel, of war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity in Gaza. Hailed by rights groups and several states, the report has been condemned by Israel and the U.S. as biased. They pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas into derailing it at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

That led to a storm of protest, forcing him to recant and muster the support of China and 17 others in the 47-member council to tackle it today and tomorrow. The Security Council debated it yesterday.

It's against this backdrop that I reached Jilani on the phone Tuesday in her native Lahore.

Of the American double standards, she said: "Yes that's true. But I'm not really that concerned with what an individual country's political and special interests may demand it to be. But I do have very high expectations of multilateral bodies, like the UN, to restore some credibility to their ability to hold people accountable. Without accountability and justice, there can be no peace.

"My expectation at that time (Darfur) and also now is that the Security Council would make sure that it takes steps in order to make the international justice system more credible and that (it) be more consistent in the way it applies its power and its sanctions."

The Goldstone panel asked both Israel and Hamas to hold their own internal investigations into alleged war crimes. Failing that, it urged the Security Council to turn the issue over to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Jilani said the panel was aware of Israel's record of ignoring international law and discriminating against Palestinians internally. And that Israel had held probes that had effectively whitewashed its military actions in Gaza. Yet the panel wanted the council to give Israel a chance to hold transparent and credible investigations.

The panel was also cognizant that "there's no equivalence between what a state does and what non-state actors (like Hamas) do."

Yet Israel has "absolute responsibility as an occupying force toward the civilian population, a responsibility that has very clearly been violated." Israel has kept the Palestinians "under an extremely repressive occupation for 40 years" and, then, launched the war on Gaza – "a step too far."

On the other hand, "we have no doubt that the actions taken by the armed groups, including Hamas, against the population of southern Israel amount to war crimes because they targeted and killed and caused suffering to civilian populations in those areas ...

"We don't believe that you can take advantage of being a non-state actor and commit violations and gross violations of human rights."

So the panel called for accountability from Hamas as well.

Of Abbas's initial decision to shelve the report, Jilani said: "I think it was a very ill-considered move on his part. I've been in Gaza. I've met the victims, as I've met the victims from southern Israel of rocket attacks from Hamas and other groups. And I know what the victims' expectations are.

"I think it'd be very cruel to not give credence to their voices."

hsiddiq@thestar.ca
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